The Rogues' Game

by Milton T. Burton

  “Why did you bring so many if you’re only going to fight five?”

  “To match weights at weigh-in. We have to come within two ounces of one another’s birds, so it may take that many to find five pairs that match up. And we may have to trim feathers to get that. But I leave all that business to Tom these days. I trained him good and he’s got a head full of sense that he come into the world with, so I don’t worry about it.”

  We climbed from the car and headed toward the pit. Near the door we ran into a pair of men I’d known for years but hadn’t seen in almost a decade. Jack Amber and Little Tommy Trehan had been partners since they met in an Allied convalescent center in France after both had been wounded in the First World War. Amber was a tall, courtly individual who originally came from a crossroads village not far from my own hometown down in deep East Texas. Trehan, an ex-jockey, was a tiny man who’d been born to an unmarried slattern in London’s notorious East End in the waning years of the last century. When the First World War broke out, he saw military service as a way out of a dead-end life in the slums. Initially rejected because of his height, he persisted in his efforts to enlist, and was successful after the Somme Campaign when the thinning British ranks made recruiters less fastidious of the printed rules concerning the minimum size for soldiers.

  After the Armistice, the little Englishman accompanied Amber back home to Texas, and during Prohibition they became the society bootleggers in Houston. They also had a small bookmaking operation, and in those days Trehan could often be found at the Maceo brothers’ Turf Athletic Club on Galveston Island where he was the odds maker for local sporting events.

  Both wore suits and ties that night, though Amber had removed his coat against the heat. When I introduced them to Little, the old moonshiner peered at the larger man quizzically for a few moments, then said, “I know Jack Amber. Me and him did some whiskey business back years ago.”

  “I remember it well,” Amber said, shaking Little’s hand.

  “What brings you two up here?” I asked.

  “We kept getting customers who wanted to place bets on this grudge match,” Amber said. “We got the odds out of Hot Springs, and then booked the action, but we decided to drive up and see what all the excitement was about.”

  “Well, I’m the man with the Tulsa Grays,” Little told them. “How are the odds running on my match?”

  “Eight to seven in your favor,” Trehan said.

  “Shit,” Little said in disgust. “I wonder what genius thought that up. I wouldn’t give myself better than even money here tonight.”

  “Whatever you say, mate,” Trehan agreed with a quick nod.

  Little shrugged. “Well, I guess maybe them boys down in Hot Springs think they know more about cocking than I do. Let’s go inside.”

  The pit was pandemonium. At least five hundred people were crammed into the building, most of them sitting on rude bleachers that rose on all four sides to near the ceiling. The air was thick with tobacco smoke, and the odor of sweat mixed with strong drink was almost overpowering. The pit itself was a square enclosure surrounded by a board wall about three feet high. A fight had just finished and the pitters were taking their birds from the pit. Both cocks appeared dead.

  When Chicken Little entered the building, a great cheer went up from the crowd. It was obvious that he was the hometown favorite, but he took the acclaim in stride. He gave a quick wave to the spectators, then turned back to shake hands once again with Amber and Trehan. “My regards in case I don’t see you again,” he said. “I need to go tend to business.”

  All around us bets were being settled and new ones made. Across the way a couple of men who were dressed like Manlow Rhodes stood talking and backslapping with three bleached-out Okies who looked too tired and defeated to have even considered going west with the Dust Bowl migration, while nearby a sweet-faced thirtyish woman in a sequined cocktail dress counted out a lost wager to a smiling old Negro who wore the most ragged pair of overalls I’ve ever seen on a man in public. And in front of them all, in the middle of the first row of spectators, sat Clifton Robillard and Simon Van Horn.

  Van Horn saw me about the same time I noticed them. He poked Robillard in the ribs and pointed my way. Robillard swung around and recognized me immediately. He motioned for me to come over, but I gave him a friendly wave and turned to Trehan and asked him a question. It got the voluble Cockney started talking, and I watched Robillard out the corner of my eye while the small man prattled on. Soon Robillard rose to his feet and started walking toward us, followed by Simon Van Horn and two younger men.

  “Bad pennies just turn up everywhere,” he said as soon as he was close enough for his silky voice to be heard over the din of the crowd.

  I swung around and stuck out my hand. “I was just thinking the same thing.”

  As usual, Robillard looked like he’d just stepped out of an ad in Esquire. He wore a three-piece suit of cream-colored linen, a red tie and a wide-brimmed Panama hat. Van Horn wore blue seersucker and was hatless. The two men with them were younger and looked like professional strong-arm, and not particularly bright strong-arm, either. The larger of the pair was a bulky, tough-looking guy in his late twenties who had a headful of long, oily hair and a sullen expression. The other was a smaller man with a crew cut and a surly, pinched face that could have fit on a B movie villain. Both were decked out in what was called the California style back then, which meant they were dressed badly. Their version of bad meant light-colored suits worn over two-toned knitted polo shirts with matching brown-and-white shoes.

  I shook hands with all four men. The larger goon hesitated for a moment before extending his paw while he looked me over with a scowl that was meant to be intimidating. “Dewey Sipes,” he said.

  I treated him to the same goofy grin that I’d given Ollie Marne at our first meeting, and asked him if he’d heard the one about the two-headed farmer. This earned me nothing beyond a deepening of his scowl. I quickly forgot about him and turned my attention to Robillard.

  “I’m surprised to see you here,” I said. “I had no idea you were an enthusiast of this sort of sport.”

  “Well, I could say the same thing about you,” Robillard answered.

  “I’m not, actually.”

  “Oh, I see. Then you don’t bet on the contests?”

  “I hadn’t planned to,” I replied.

  “That’s a shame. Earlier in the evening I tried to get a little action going with your friends here,” he said, indicating Amber and Trehan. “But they didn’t want any part of it.”

  “I only wager on things I understand,” Trehan remarked pleasantly.

  “You mentioned that before,” Dewey Sipes growled.

  “That’s right, I did,” the tiny Englishman answered belligerently. “And I’ll bloody well say it again as often as I bloody well like.”

  Sipes opened his mouth to speak, but Robillard gave him a glare and he snapped it shut.

  “Well, I thought I might find some real gambling men up here with this big grudge match and all the advertising that’s been done,” Robillard said. “But it looks like it’s all tinhorn stuff.”

  “I would have thought you get enough action back at the Weilbach,” I told him.

  “Oh, I take it wherever I can get it. I love to gamble. Sometimes I go as far north as Saratoga for the horse races.”

  “I see. Just exactly what did you have in mind?” I asked.

  “I thought maybe somebody might like to go four or five thousand on this grudge match tonight. That’s what I offered your friends, but they weren’t interested.”

  “Tell me about that five-thousand-dollar bet,” I said.

  “I like the Thompson’s Whites,” he replied. “I hear they’re giving the Grays eight to seven odds over at the Springs, but I got enough confidence in the Thompson birds to offer even odds. Think you might be interested?”

  “I’ve only got about a thousand on me,” I said.

  “That’s all right. I’ll
take your marker when I win.”

  Why I plunged in, I don’t know to this day. I was as ignorant of cockfighting as it was possible for a man to be, and even Chicken Little didn’t give himself better than even odds. But I had come to Texas in the first place to confront Clifton Robillard, and fate seemed to be handing me an opportunity to do it away from the poker table. Besides, it was really a win/win situation for me since I now had the extra money to play with. If he lost, I had just burrowed myself that much further under his skin; if I lost it would only serve to make him more arrogant and reckless at the Weilbach game, something that would make his inevitable fall just that much sweeter when it came. So I pretended to deliberate for a minute, rubbing my chin thoughtfully. “I’ve got a better offer,” I told him. “How about twenty-five and I give you Hot Springs odds.”

  “What? Just twenty-five hundred? But I wanted to go at least five—”

  I interrupted him. “No sir. Twenty-five thousand. And I’ll give you Hot Springs odds and take your marker when I win.”

  Such a bet was unheard of in cocking circles in those days, and he looked at me in disbelief. Then, for just an instant, I was able to enjoy the expression of pure, vertigolike fear that swept through his cold blue eyes, and I honestly believe that at that precise moment he began to suspect that I was something more than I appeared to be. No matter what the outcome that evening, I’d unnerved him. Of course, he was worth many times that sum, but some things I’d heard around town had led me to suspect that he was cash poor at the moment. If that was true and he lost, he might be hard-pressed to come up with the money on a few days’ notice.

  It was Trehan who broke the silence. “Well, mate, you said you wanted to find a real gambling man, and it appears to me that you are bloody well looking at one right now.”

  “What’s it going to be, Mr. Robillard?” I asked. “You were looking for some action and here it is.”

  Robillard glanced at Simon Van Horn.

  “Don’t try to pull me into this mess,” Van Horn said, holding up his hands. “I think you’re both crazy to even think about betting money on damn chickens in the first place.”

  Robillard regained his composure. “Your man’s birds are favored,” he finally said.

  “That’s right, they are. But Mr. Little himself says that he doesn’t give his own cocks better than an even chance to win. If you lose, you only owe me around twenty-two thousand, but if I lose I’ll owe you the whole twenty-five. If it was pot odds in a poker game it would be the time for you to call rather than fold.”

  He had very little choice after the way he had talked. And like all plunging gamblers, he was more inclined to dwell on the joys of winning than on the possibility of defeat. He finally nodded and extended his hand. “All right, it’s a bet.”

  We shook hands once more, then stood around for a while talking about not much of anything. After a time he and Van Horn and the two young toughs drifted away.

  “Let’s go out to our car and have a drink,” Amber said, taking my arm and steering me toward the door.

  A few minutes later we were taking pulls out of a bottle of Johnny Walker when Trehan asked, “Bad blood between the two of you, mate?”

  “A little. And it looks like there’s going to be more, doesn’t it?” I answered with a grin.

  “What’s his gripe?”

  “I’ve hit him pretty heavily here lately at the poker table, and he doesn’t like to lose.”

  “Who does?” Trehan asked.

  “I think this is one for the record books,” Amber said.

  He was right. The grudge match started a half hour later, and after ten minutes the first two Tulsa Grays were stone dead and it looked like I was going to be paying off the largest single loss of my life outside the poker table.

  TWENTY-SIX

  I saw a mild ray of hope when the third of Little’s cocks won handily after forty minutes in the pit. The referee gave the crowd a ten-minute break while the vendors worked the crowd selling soft drinks and peanuts and cotton candy. There were whole families present that night, many of them clans of rough Okie and Arkie hill people, but there were others who were soundly middle class. I noticed two young couples, high school boys and their bobby-soxer girlfriends. One of the girls was pale and looked as though she was on the verge of fainting, but the other had a ruddy blush to her cheeks and a gleam in her eye that was almost sexual. During the last fight her gaze had been fixed on the pit, and her breath was coming in short, breast-heaving little gasps. Unless I missed my guess, a violent and atavistic sport had made another convert.

  Then the fourth fight began. In cockfighting the roosters have their spurs clipped off and long blades known as gaffs are attached to their legs. These gaffs are razor sharp and make the whole affair quite bloody. The fight starts after the handlers have gone through a preliminary ritual called billing that consists of holding the cocks face-to-face where they can only peck at one another. This is supposed to raise their rage to a murderous pitch and it usually does. The fight begins when the referee calls out, “Pit your cocks!” and the handlers turn the animals loose with their right hands. There’s a whole set of rules that circumscribe the posture and behavior of the handlers, rules so elaborate and arcane that I’m convinced anyone who can master them would also be capable of becoming a nuclear physicist.

  The fourth fight lasted about fifteen minutes and ended when the Thompson bird let out one long, bloodcurdling squawk and then fell over dead. The referee called another break before the final fight. The tension in the room was palpable enough that it could have been boxed and sold at the concessions. During the lull in the action a couple of fistfights broke out, only to be quickly broken up by the off-duty cops who were on hand. I felt the tension myself even though it was a no-lose situation for me. But I’m naturally competitive, and I didn’t want to win by losing; I wanted to win by winning.

  Soon the handlers were in the pit billing the cocks. When the referee called for them to loose the birds, the two roosters came together and flew at least four feet up in the air. When they separated I thought I’d lost. Little’s Tulsa Gray fell to the ground on its back, utterly motionless, both feet in the air and its head to one side, its tongue hanging out. The referee was about to call the fight when it came alive and jumped to its feet. It shook itself off, and then tore into the other bird like the Twentieth Century Limited passing a freight train.

  It was the bloodiest fight of the evening. Three times the birds got their gaffs tangled and had to be separated by the handlers. Both were exhausted by the time it ended. At the last scratch the birds wobbled toward each other from opposite sides of the pit and struck, flying only a little more than a foot into the air this time. When they came down the Tulsa Gray was again on its back, but it was clearly alive and its right gaff was sunk in the Thompson bird’s brain. After a few quivering death throes, it was all over, and Little’s bird even managed to get to its feet. With the last of its energy it climbed atop the other rooster and crowed once before it fell to the side, spent but still alive. I was $22,000 to the better, and it gave me as much satisfaction as any wager I ever won.

  The famed Bo Thompson was a tall, thin, bent man who looked like a human question mark with a sour face. The referee brought him and Little face-to-face in the center of the pit and they shook hands to the roar of the crowd.

  “Time to settle all wagers,” the referee called out. Thompson dug his wallet from the depths of his coat and pulled out a single one-dollar bill, which he then handed to Little. The old man held the bill high above his head and the hometown crowd went wild. When the cheers died down, he stepped out of the pit, and said to me, “I need to go check on Tom and the gamecocks. I’ll be just a minute.”

  I nodded and told him to take his time. What I had witnessed that night had hardly been a Harvard/Yale game, but winning $22,000 from Clifton Robillard had given it a certain rough charm of its own.

  And that was that. I waved to Robillard and tried to get aw
ay without talking to him, but he motioned for me to wait. I went around the pit, threading my way through the crowd, and met him halfway. Van Horn stayed in his seat and the two young toughs were nowhere to be seen, though I thought nothing of it at the time. Robillard stuck out his hand. His face held a forced smile, and the fear I’d seen earlier was gone from his eyes. “I’ll have your money next week,” he purred. “Is poker night okay, or do you need it before then?”

  “No hurry,” I told him.

  “Would you like to have a drink?” he asked. “I know a good night spot.”

  I shook my head. “Thank you anyway, but I’m tired and I know Mr. Little wants to get back home.”

  “Then I will see you Friday night at the Weilbach.”

  Chicken Little soon returned and we left the building. The parking lot was lighted by three large lamps hung high on electrical poles, but our car was in its darkest corner. To get to where I’d parked the Lincoln in the last row of the contestants’ section, we had to walk between two large trucks—a one-ton Chevy panel job and a Dodge stake bed. Little was a few feet ahead of me and to my right. The Chevy was to my left. The old man had just reached the back of the Dodge and turned to say something when I saw an arm go around his neck. The arm was wearing a light-colored coat sleeve and my mind also registered the toe of a two-toned shoe when a blur came out from behind the Chevy. I saw Chicken Little pull his knees up into a standing fetal position and slide from the man’s grasp, leaving the attacker with an armful of fedora and air. But by then I had problems of my own to contend with.

  The blur in front of me had a club that was about the length of a cop’s nightstick. If he’d tried for a hard poke in my solar plexus, he might have incapacitated me, but like most amateurs he was overeager for a knockout. Instead, he made a great roundhouse swing at my skull that gave me time to react. I lowered my head and raised my shoulder, pivoting my upper body toward rather than away from him as he had expected. Not only did this surprise him, but it had the effect of making him overswing and hit my shoulder with his arm rather than the club. I landed one good, stiff punch to his left kidney and reached up to grab two handfuls of oily hair. Then using every ounce of my strength, I slammed him face-first into the side of the Chevy panel truck. The impact stunned him and brought him to his knees. This gave me a couple of seconds to get an even better grip on his head, and as soon as I had his greasy mop woven into my fingers, I pounded his face into the truck’s fender three more times as hard as I could. Bones snapped and teeth flew. I stepped back to see Dewey Sipes on his hands and knees, his face a broken, pulpy mass of blood and snot, his eyes gazing out at nothing with an expression of complete amazement. Then I kicked him in the belly as hard as I could, and heard him retching soundly as I turned to Chicken Little. He didn’t need any help. He and his attacker were both on their hands and knees. The goon was trying desperately to crawl away while Little slashed and hacked at the backs of his legs with what I knew was the razor-sharp old German-made switchblade he’d carried for years. By this time the man was screeching at the top of his lungs and imploring any number of deities for relief. Finally, he managed to lunge to his feet and bolt away, and even in the dim light I could see the backs of his pants shiny with the blood that was now streaming from numerous cuts and slashes.